wanted to stamp out intolerance! 8)

Angharad

There's a fascinating article in this month's Scientific American, "Your Cells Are My Cells," which describes the phenomenon of microchimerism, the existence of genetically-different cells, and even organ systems, in human beings and other animals, descended from cells that pass through the placental barrier during pregnancy.

It seems that the whole idea of rigidly autonomous "individuals" who exist as a sort of archetype of their own unique genome is a convenient and self-aggrandising fiction, as seductive and misleading as ghostly Platonic universals floating about in the pristine Neverland of a Platonic hyperspace somehow set aside from the messy reality of quantum space-time.

And oddly enough, the transfer works both ways -- cells from the mother (which may include cells from *her* mother and previous foetus) pass to the foetus and vice versa, making a nice slippery mess of things which mostly passes beneath our notice but sometimes appears in strange ways, in autoimmune and other diseases, in compensation for genetic diseases that ought to do us harm, and possibly other things difficult to imagine.

SciAm.com February, 2008 issue

http://tinyurl.com/2hdt95

"I contain multitudes." --- Walt Whitman

This may help to explain the fact that mothers who give birth to male children have, on average, their lives shortened by several years (See, you really *were* killing your mother) and (this is pure speculation on my part) *may* have something to do with various otherwise unexplained mental conditions.

... (three dot journalism, an homage to Herb Caen)

When one looks at the so-called LBGT spectrum, one may be struck by the suspicious neatness of it, the cheery "categories" which offer safe havens for people who want to be "different," but not too terribly different.

The whole system reminds me of phrenology, or the clever racial theories of European "scientists" in the Nineteenth Century who discovered that Europeans, especially northern and western Europeans, were gratifyingly placed at the very pinnacle of the hierarchical evolutionary tree, somehow just a tiny bit less exalted than the angels.

It strikes me that we're all of us "queer," but that this "queerness" may take many forms, based on societal happenstance, situational experience, and personal interactions.

When viewed from the perspective of Anita Bryant heterosexuality, all those "disgusting homosexuals" are, in fact, "transgendered," if not in body image then in actions and/or inclinations. When one arranges the various "deviations" from the "norm" based on more-or-less objective criteria of actions and self-description, one finds not discrete buckets of pink, blue, and lavender, but a swirling mass of scumbled colours, a rainbow solid in multiple dimensions that changes over time, with today's gender-queer "boi" on a chopped Harley tomorrow's soccer mom in a white Chevy minivan, and today's brawny governator yesterday's soft-core gay heartthrob.

These things are fads, I think. When I grew up, butch/femme was where the action was, but then flannel dykes were hot and everyone had to wear jeans, workboots, and plaid logging shirts. Now, half the old butches have re-imaged themselves as f-t-m men and the other half are still playing out a stereotyped role as anachronistic as the hardboiled detective in a film noir three-reeler from the Forties. Some of the Femmes are now tops, some are bottoms, and most are in between, and the tres girly outfits of the Sixties are now dress-for-success corporate chic with lipstick. Go figure.

As far as I can see, there's no substantial difference between an imponderable "identity" and an equally imponderable "preference." They're both fluid and may change over time, one merging seamlessly into the other. I've *seen* angry radical Separatist stomping dykes turn into simpering wives and mothers, and I wouldn't be at all surprised to discover front-page pictures of Cheney shagging Bush in a White House closet on the pages of the National Inquirer some fine day, with Laura an avid voyeur in the background, outfitted with black leather bullwhip and nipple clamps. Things change. Things are quite often not what they seem to be. In the case of rabid anti-homosexuals, perhaps the unexpected really ought to be expected. Hitler (or was it Goebells) once observed that the best Nazis were often former Communists, and the outing of prominent public fag-baiters as closet queens is so commonplace as to tar the rest of the pack with the same 'tain't, if only they realised it.

We may all of us be disgusted or gratified on alternate days in alternate ways by various "alternative lifestyles."

I find contemptible the use of young children as sexual objects by older men but Socrates thought it was only natural, pederastic sexual tourism is a thriving industry, and Vladimir Nabokov made a pile of money from the mere idea. Type in the word "Lolita" in Google and you'll find 59,500,000 hits. Type in the word with "-sex" to exclude the most obvious pornography sites and the number goes down a a mere 2,240,000. Golly! It would seem, by elementary economic theory, that the number of potential customers must have something to do with the numbers on offer, which would seem to imply in turn that (assuming, let's say, a very frugal twenty customers per site, and factoring in the scanty penetration --- if you'll pardon the expression --- of the Internet) a very substantial proportion of the male (funny, that one "naturally" assumes that dirty old men are usually male, so let's include a few millions of women as well) population of this planet find the idea titillating. Fancy that.

But one never knows... perhaps, in some unhoped-for future, my brain riddled with the lesions of Alzheimer's syndrome, I'll learn to be more tolerant.

In the meantime...

Rachel, Rachel, I've been thinking
What a queer world this would be
If the men were all transported
Far beyond the Northern Sea!

Rachel, Rachel, I've been thinking
Life would be so easy then;
What a lovely world this would be
If there were no tiresome men!

Any woman can...

Cheers...